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chiguy writes with this snippet From NBC News: "The Equifax credit reporting agency, with the aid of thousands of human resource departments around the country, has assembled...[a database]...containing 190 million employment and salary records covering more than one-third of U.S. adults...[Equifax] says [it] is adding 12 million records annually.' This salary information is for sale: "Its database is so detailed that it contains week-by-week paystub information dating back years for many individuals, as well as ... health care provider, whether someone has dental insurance and if they've ever filed an unemployment claim.""

Privacy and sin,
Like skin on the chin,
Covered by hair,
Nicked by tech #FTWBurma Shave

This is an important story, beyond the troll.
A political party supporting liberty, where that is defined in part as the right to own all data pertaining to yourself, would see a great deal of support.
And we can expect any of our entrenched parties to support liberty in 3. ..2. . .

You are obviously not familiar with Burma Shave, its a 1950s thing. There were signs on the road, each sign had a single line, ending with "Burma Shave". It was not supposed to be fine prose. I think they covered it in the pilot episode of Quantum Leap.

It's easy to forget that almost all cross country traffic before the construction of the Interstates moved on two lane rural roads at an average speed of 45 mph or less. The first Burma Shave signs were placed in 1925. The verses began appearing in 1929.

Here are two examples from 1939:

Hardly a driver / Is now alive / Who passed / On hills / At 75 / Burma-Shave

RN: Contemptible Weakling, if you were strong, I would help you. Or perhaps I would murder you and take everything that makes you strong. That certainly would be an option for a Heroic Spirit. But you are weak and destined for failure.

Citizen: My family is in the house! Oh, save them!

RN: Pusillanimous Conformist Vermin, you have bred hapless, dependent whelps as pathetic as yourself. You are weak and destined for failure. I am indifferent to your suffering. { begins to fly away }

There's no need. Paleface speaks with forked tongue. What they say they stand for and what they actually stand for are miles apart. There are any number of things they support, push for, or exploit within the electorate that they should leave well enough alone.

Current? Here's the constitutional amendment Rand proposed: "Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of production and trade. .."

That means no safety regulations, no minimum wage, no antitrust legislation, no public roads, and no regulations on the financial markets. It means that if I sell you a product that is poisonous and it debilitates you for the rest of your life, you can sue me in civil court and that's the solution to keep things like lead paint off of products (and, of course, if you're too poor to sue me in civil court you're a worthless fuck who deserves lead poisoning; i.e., all low income housing would be painted with lead paint).

The current version of the libertarian party is the same version of 'libertarianism' that's existed since FDR was in office. It's a negative response to New Deal policies, which largely consisted of various subsidies and restraints on big institutions. While I agree with your post, there's nothing current about this view, and it's not a 'nutbag arm' of the libertarians -- the nutbag shit is what defines one as a libertarian. Libertarians are the opposite extreme as communists but they face the same problem: If only people would stop acting like human beings, their utopian paradises would be possible.

Um, sorry, not true. The current libertarianism is from the seventies, I believe. The earlier libertarians were *LEFT* wing, and friends of the IWW (and I have an old pamphlet my father picked up in the early fifties to prove it).

The current libertarians, of course, fall into my aphorism: there are two kinds of Republicans: millionaires, and suckers. I suggest that if you're a libertarian and posting here, you're the latter.

This one. This right here. All of our income is from our salary, but what they report is not their income. The ones who run the game don't play by the same rules as us.
"Ah, I see you are the CEO of a fortune 500 company. Let's see here. It says your salary is $1. Sorry sir, I'm afraid we can't grant you a loan. Or do you have some other sources of income you would like to report?"

BWWAAHAHAHAAaaahahahahaaaaa! He thinks fortune 500 CEOs need to get loans!

Oh, god no son. Where have you been? If they really want something big, like corporate big, they get their corporation to buy it. Or they make a corporation on paper, funnel some money to it in various ways, and have the corporation take out the loan based on those assets, not their own. Or they don't funnel money to the corporation, but set up a loan based on the assets they're about to buy with said loan. Or, much like the lowly wor

Exactly. At many schools football makes all of the other sports possible. Soccer, volleyball, softball, baseball, swimming, etc. are all financial burdens. The losses from these sports are often 'balanced' by the gains of the football program. If you think it's bad that a given major University might lose a few million a year overall on their athletic program imagine what they would lose without football.

There are 120 (USA) college football teams. That's $4.16 mill spread over every college. The AVERAGE salary of a head coach is $1.6 mill [forbes.com] (Fucking hell!). Assistant coaches makes $200,000. There are usually... what? 5-9? You've still got a million dollars left over, but you haven't yet paid for anything to actually play the game, you've just paid $360,000,000 per year for people to tell you how to play the game. You've still got the tuition of all 2,520 players, travel expenses, all the little crap like uni

That's because rich people there have better things to do than to run for public office. And politicians are viewed with suspicion if they do not depend on their salary to live on. You need to show a reasonable income to show "I'm one of you". Unlike the US where "I made it rich" is seen as a sign of potential for POTUS, but you don't want to show that you made it rich by gaming the system.

They get big pay because their buddies sit on their board. These CEOs also sit on THEIR buddies boards. They vote each other big packages. If YOU want a big pay package are you going to vote down a big pay package for one of your buddies?

Lets say:I have a skill set. This company will pay me 1M for it, that one for 1.5M. I choose the 1.5M. I work there 6 consecutive years. In that time I increase revenue by 300%, stock price doubles, everyones happy, and I even got a boost to 1.9M 18 months ago. I've now established that I'm not only good at what I do, but I'm worth at least 1.8M. Now two other companies are tryinig to pull me away. current company offers an increase to 2.2M to keep me because Company A offerered me the same to come to them

Or let's see reality. You have 6 companies A-F, with corresponding CEOs A-F. Each company has a remuneration committee that votes on the compensation for the CEO.

The remuneration committee for company/CEO A consists of people who happen to be CEOs [B-F]The remuneration committee for company/CEO B consists of people who happen to be CEOs [A,C-F]The remuneration committee for company/CEO C consists of people who happen to be CEOs [A-B,D-F]etc.etc.

Market forces have nothing to do with it (otherwise why would companies that make losses still increase executive compensation? Why would executives who have failed still be getting higher and higher paid jobs?). It's all a big exercise in scratching each others' backs. Even if it's not by design, and even if your pay is decided by people a few steps removed, there's still a circular dependency where it's in no-one's interest to vote down remuneration.

Even without the direct link above, you still see examples of 'Other companies of size XXX pay YYY for this position so we are going to pay YYY+ZZZ to get the best person'. The people who make these decisions are also in the market for these jobs: It's not in their interest to push the pay down as it would indirectly push down or limit their own pay.

I work there 6 consecutive years. In that time I increase revenue by 300%, stock price doubles, everyones happy, and I even got a boost to 1.9M 18 months ago. I've now established that I'm not only good at what I do

Now let's look at reality. The last CEO got caught tapping the mayor's wife (take that as you will) and the company had to write down a $20M golden parachute to get rid of him. The payoff almost zeroed out revenue for the year, and the scandal dropped the company's stock price by half.

You came on as a hired gun to make some nasty changes and take the heat off the "real" next CEO. You outsource the only employment within 100 miles of a small town in Nebraska, to Bangalore. Over the next five years, the stock price and revenue recover back to normal. In the sixth year, you announce plans to destroy another small town, and step down when the PR backlash gets too intense. The company officially denounces you, but you have your choice of three positions already lined up to do the exact same thing.

Sorry, but no CEO can boost revenue by 300% through anything even remotely creditable as "skill". A really good CEO might sustain 10% "real" growth on average, in a good economy. When you see BS numbers like that, it just screams "bookkeeping games".

/ Bernie Madoff reported near-legendary gains of a mere 11% per year for an equally amazing decade and a half. He should have just hired you for six months, eh?

After spending over a year on a mission to get my credit report "fixed", I have a number of anecdotal stories regarding the inherent inaccuracy of the reporting that goes into these databases. My credit reports were not that bad but after a review of the report from the top three agencies, I discovered dozens of factually inaccurate items ranging from wrong addresses to poorly formatted history items. My reports contained input from companies I had never done business with and companies that no longer existed.
The problem with this is that if they can't be trusted to confirm the proper spelling of your name, how can they be the "authoritative" source for detailed information regarding your trustworthiness.

My wife is fixing her credit right now. And she has the same problem. She is even responsible for debt she did not make on the basis that she can not prove that she did not make that debt. Most of the entry are indeed wrongly labeled which is quite scary frankly. That credit report business is complete BS in here. They hold a list of things that you did secret. You can access it but with a ridiculously high fee. And you can not contest anything important.

What would be more interesting is you can prove the debts are not her own and pursue a successful libel case against them. A few of those with some considerable damage award is about the only thing that will drive these 'agencies' to fix their quality issues.

Having worked with my company's HR dept recently to fix a glitch with printing out payroll info, they are extremely paranoid about preventing other employees from seeing anyone's salary. However, the paranoia seems to be limited to preventing employees from seeing what each other makes rather than preventing any third party from accessing it.

If you are a bank considering loaning me money, then I can choose to share my salary information with you. There is no reason at all for this information to be made available without the individual's permission!

The rule of thumb is, how does the proposed law affect a corporate entity that has its hand in the lobbying game.

If it has no affect, it will be ignored and never brought up. It's a waste of time.If it is detrimental, it will be openly struck down.If it means money in the pockets of corporate partners, it will sail right through.

This works WAY more often than not. It gets more interesting when more than one special interest in involved. Then there is a fight. The big guy usually wins (look at the oil lobby).

As I understand HIPPA (and I am not a doctor or a lawyer but someone that had to worry about this for a specific project at one time), it covers your health care professional and means nothing to your employer or other agency.

Again... it's corporate anarchy. They have this information and they are going to leverage it. They're WAY bigger than individuals or families, so screw you.

Not True. I worked a contract for a health department, and HIPAA violations cover employers, providers, and insurers/agents. However, the key thing is if it would be considered 'protected health information' (PHI). There is alot of data that is not PHI that can legally be shared. PHI really centers on personally identifiable health information. Insurance status generally falls outside of that.

In our culture, we are afraid of abuses.... legitimately! Having this information for sale can easily be used for such obvious purposes as rejecting a job candidate because their past salary is "too high". Stronger privacy protection is generally considered the antidote to such potential abuses. However, more and more regulation leads to greater and greater bureaucracy and therefore the cost of government increases.

Another solution is a longer-term solution and that is to address the underlying cultural assumptions and shift the world to a more positive outlook based on the idea of the inherent nobility of humans. Our bureaucracy has grown as we have moved away from a perspective on the noble human to the animal human with greed motivating our every move. In fact, this is a cultural choice, not a foregone conclusion.

At some point, I hope that we (culturally) will start responding to these sorts of crisis with a long-term view to improving humanity rather than reacting to the down-side.

Just this week, in the paper, I read that one senator is proposing a bill to allow employees to freely and openly discuss their pay. But here we read that this information is simply handed over to credit agencies. These credit agencies can then basically sell your information to Credit Card companies, Banks and more.

So it really begs the question, why am I not allowed to openly discuss my salary information but HR can hand it out to a Credit agency where from there it can be sold to half the corporations in America?

Our government really does not care about it's citizens any longer, only which corporations donate the most to their campaigns./sigh

Not exactly. Some workplaces mandate that you're not allowed to discuss your salary on penalty of being fired. Typically because some people at the same level are being paid vastly different sums and if they were told what they were being paid, they'd reasonably be upset.

I'm not being conspiracy nut in this. This is just one more tool that HR departments can use to keep pay low for people applying for work at a company. They always ask for what your current salary is. Before an applicant could lie and tell the HR department a higher number and get offered that higher number. Now they can just check this database and see what the number actually is.

When I job switched in the past I've never been offered a number higher than what I currently made when I was truthful about my salary, and I screwed myself over. There was a time when I worked for a start-up and my salary was frozen for four years. When that job died I told my new employer what I was making and got offered a bit less since it was a rough job market. The raises I got at that job were less than inflation. The last time I switched I took my salary at the start of the previous job, ran it through the inflation calculator, added 10% and told that number to the new company. That was the number that I was offered, and they gave me some song and dance about it was a privilege about working in the industry when I tried to see if I could get it higher. So I got a 17% raise over my previous company.

Now with this database that tactic is no longer viable. And if you don't tell them the current number you're making and then check it out, they can mark you as dishonest. Kind of hypocritical if you ask me.

Don't answer that question. Most companies are not going to pay to look up your old salary.

Don't switch jobs for less than X% increase. You decide X. I had an employer once tell me 10% was too much even though they wanted me to shoulder considerable moving expenses. I let them know that I was then not interested in working in such a place.

If you need the work bad you can take it, but when job switching you can be considerably more picky.

When my identity was stolen (credit card opened in my name by someone with my name/address/SSN/DOB), I froze my credit and my wife's credit. This means that nobody can read our credit files or add to it without our permission. If we want to get a car loan, refinance my mortgage, or open a new credit card, we need to thaw out our credit files. (This costs us $5 per person per agency - of which there are 3 - but this fee varies by state.) If a potential employer wants to run a credit check on me, they'll need to ask for my permission before they can see my credit file.

Anyone can freeze their credit file. It's the law in most states and the District of Columbia. (Only Alabama and Michigan have no law and a few states limit it to ID theft victims.) The credit agencies have "voluntarily" offered to freeze credit for anyone who wants it frozen. (Translation: They were forced to by law in most states so they might as well offer it in the remaining ones.) The only difference that a police report makes is that (depending on state law), it might make your freeze free instead of charged for.

http://www.consumersunion.org/campaigns/learn_more/003484indiv.html

Here's how to place a freeze on your credit file from the 3 major credit bureaus:

Speaking from experience, it can be a pain to deal with from time to time, but it is much less of a pain then discovering that someone went on a spending spree on your credit line and you need to repair the damage.

... why demand the secrecy? Why not adopt a Nordic-style openness that shows who pays what taxes and where the taxes actually go. I also appreciated my annual credit history/report that was automatically mailed to my address when I lived in Stockholm. Why do you guys have to make everything so complicated? There's no security through obscurity.

The problem in the USA is the absolutely insane marketing. If public information shows that you make a good income and keep your debts under control, you will be bombarded with "pre-approved credit cards", "refinance your home with us", "buy a new car here", "lose all your money in our casino", and other lovely stuff.

If you live in Europe, you have no idea. When I went back to visit the US for several weeks a couple of years ago, I found the incessant marketing just incredible. The bank tellers trying to sign you up for credit cards. Every phone call to a company begins with a recorded sales pitch. Television shows contain more commercials than content, especially the children's shows. It's just incredible. I suppose you must eventually get numb to it...

Wanted to mention something very relevant about Equifax. I took advantage of a "get your credit score" free offer several years ago that was posted on Slick Deals. It involved giving Equifax a little data on myself, including an email address that they sent the final credit score report to. I've long used the Spamgourmet forwarding service, so I created and used a unique email address for this purpose. Never gave it to anyone else. It even includes Equifax as part of the name, as well as a "watch word" that was only active for a month when the Equifax account was created. Later I started getting LOTS of spam from Chinese sources to that email address. I don't think it was intercepted, as Equifax hadn't sent me any more mail for quite a while. No one got into my system and none of my other accounts started getting spammed, only the Equifax account.

So, as I see it that leaves three possible causes: Equifax sold my email address to spammers, an employee at Equifax stole data and sold it, or Equifax is so insecure with this very important personal data that they were hacked by the spammers. None of these possibilities speaks well for Equifax.

As of today, 264 pieces of mail have been sent to that account, including the one or two legitimate ones. That particular account was quickly shut down without compromising my read email address, but I've always wondered what information the hackers got on me.

I'm pretty much in the same boat, but I signed up directly with the MyFICO service, which was eventually sold to Equifax. I run a wildcard email forward on a throwaway domain for all my vendor contact stuff, and I'm not getting hits like this for other domain stuff as other comments suggest. I receive obvious finance related phishing crap, related to this financial information transaction, at this specific email address. In my case, the email address was dormant for 4+ years with zero traffic before it g

And you don't know what you're talking about. Spamgourmet allows you to create very long and unique email addresses. The address that was used contained all of the following: The Equifax name (actually equifx, which is even more unique, equifax would not have worked since it wasn't created when the watchword was valid) and a long "watchword" that I appended to the end of it. The watchword is one that I had only used a couple of time in one month two years before the spam started. Then a period and a number.

I had bad experiences with credit in my early 20's. Not ashamed to admit it. The more I got to learning about how the credit system works the more I was boggled at how bad it really was and was bound and determined to get out of it by my 30's. So I spent a lot of time in my mid and late 20's with a start up that I eventually sold for a fair amount of money. It wasn't millions, but enough to pay off my debts, buy a condo that I rehabbed and then got luck to flip for a good profit, and then I bought the farm next to my Dad's.

Now I pay cash for everything. If I need a car, I try to find a good used one (although thanks to cash for clunkers there aren't a lot out there. My 2004 Chevy Impala with 130k miles could fetch way more than it's worth at the moment).

After buying the farm, I didn't have enough to buy another place so I decided to rent a loft. Walked in and they all their "credit" requirements. I asked them to figure out the amount of the lease and I'd go right to the bank and get a cashiers check for the full amount up front. Amazing how they no longer needed to run my credit.

Last year I created an LLC for my part time business of going to estate sales and then dealing in antique and vintage furniture. Went to see about credit card processing from the bank and a couple days later got a call back stating that they had a problem: there wasn't any credit records for me. I smiled, said don't worry about it and opened a square account.

I followed the link in the article:
http://www.theworknumber.com/Employees/DataReport/ [theworknumber.com]
It lets you search for your employer. My current employer does not report.
My previous employer did, but the one previous to that did not. So that's 1/3 for me.
YMMV, but it's probably worth checking. Then you can go (or not) to your HR dept and
ask them why or thank them for not divulging your info.

As our political class increasingly becomes an aristocracy, this sort of thing becomes a weapon to keep the peasants out.
Once you're a made member of the club, scrubbing your data and enjoying some privacy is a perq.

Not relevant. Signing it is a voluntary condition of employment, same as an NDA or similar.

Right - "do this or we'll destroy/limit your livelihood." Totally voluntary, just like being able to afford food and shelter, right?

FYI, it is not a "voluntary condition of employment" if not signing means you lose your job - that's the definition of compulsory. Also, just signing the document does not make it legally binding - you cannot, in fact, force your employees to sign a document that states they must perform fellatio on you on the second Tuesday of every month. Well, OK, you could make them sign it

the real unemployment rate in the U.S. is currently 23% (pre-clinton way of counting before BoL changed methodology), that's almost Great Depression levels. the knife is threat of living the life of a bum, a hobo. Quit being a shill for our very evil system

Williams recreates a ShadowStats Alternative unemployment rate reflecting methodology that includes the &ldquo;long-term discouraged workers&rdquo; that the Bureau of Labor Statistics removed in 1994 under the Clinton administration.

The BLS publishes six levels of unemployment, but only the headline U3 unemployment rate gets the press. The headline number does not count &ldquo;discouraged&rdquo; unemployed workers who have not looked for work in the past four weeks because they believe no jobs are available.

If you RTFA they are given an incentive to provide this information and they even pay Equifax for the privileged! They provide a service for employment history verification. When a potential employer or creditor wants to verify that an individual is actually employed at a company, that company would use this service to handle these verification requests. The HR dept is already overworked and they don't want the liability of a lawsuit in case they accidentally say something negative. To avoid all of this, th

You obviously have never seen a bill for braces.:-) Having said that, my premiums for dental insurance are around $80 a year for my entire family. It covers most routine things at 90-100%. The annoying part is that it costs my employer $1620 for their portion of the bill. Now, if you asked me if I'd like $1700 cash every year, or if I'd like dental insurance, I would decline the dental insurance. Unfortunately, my employer gives a whopping $100 refund if you choose to not get dental insurance. So the

Insurance makes it expensive. Your insurance is willing to pay up to $500/yr for xrays? Take a wild ass guess at the future price of xrays in a privatize the profits socialize the losses system...

Its the same thing with govt "assistance" for childcare, or "assistance" for tuition, or "assistance" for health care. Another good example is K12 education, where public takes $10K per student but private takes $2K per student to do about the same thing.

The reason dental cleanings are covered is because otherwise the insured person would not get them and would cost the insurer more. This is a case where relatively cheap preventative care can completely replace very expensive treatment. Not only that but during this cheap preventative care problems can be discovered while they are still minor and much cheaper to fix.

If you were offering insurance that covered all work on cars you would of course cover oil changes, rather than pay for blown motors from lack of them.

As an employer, I have to say that anybody stupid enough to work for a company that asks for credit information deserves what they get. The same goes for drug testing. If you're willing to sell your credit history and your personal health information for a job, then you're part of the problem.

OK, so when every job that isn't at McDonald's requires one, the other, or both, please explain how we're supposed to financially support ourselves and not be "part of the problem," as you put it.

Moral superiority is easy to feign when you're not the one getting screwed.

that is false, trivial to "investigate" someone by running background and credit checks. hint, private detectives do it all the time.

credit score is NOT more accurate, it is ONLY based on debt and payment timeliness. of course, that whole industry should have its legs broken, be demolished as horrible invasion of privacy and enslaving people. the banking / finance cartel needs to be put to the flames, most of the recession, war, starving people of resources is a direct result of their machinations